Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

DESIGNING A QUESTIONNAIRE

Analysts and project managers with no useful DW or historical questionnaire data to make segmentation from will have to make a survey themselves, if they still want to make a data-driven segmentation model. This section briefly explains how you can design a questionnaire. If you follow the general guidelines of this section, the resulting data will be structured in the same way as the data in the section “Needs-Based Segmentation Created from Questionnaire Data,” which means that you also can use the same analytical approach.

There are many good reasons for using a questionnaire to identify the needs of your customers. (This was discussed in more detail in Chapter 1 in the “Segmentation and Data Warehousing” section.) In brief, however, what you get from a DW is transactional customer behavior recorded at some touch points, but what you want to know are the customer needs that drive this behavior. Simply put, customer behavior could be to buy an electric drill machine, but what the customer really wants could be to make a nice sitting room with pictures on the walls. Therefore, you may want to consider asking the customers themselves what they want rather than focusing only on their behavior (see Exhibit 4.18).

Exhibit 4.18 From Data to Customer Needs

The benefit of a questionnaire is that you can ask customers specifically about their needs and what ...